the musings of a feline cladotherian

A deep Connection

I have always felt a very close connection to wolves. As a child I was fascinated by them, I watched documentary after documentary, spent hours researching their behaviors and habits and social structure. Half my life as a teenager was spent role-playing as a wolf on various forums.
But my connection is much deeper then that. It’s something which is quite hard to explain. I feel I am deeply connected to wolves. We share some sort of link and bond. Among wolves is where I feel safe, right, at home. I feel I possess an understanding of wolf behaviour that runs deeper than most people and doesn’t just rely on the research I’ve done. As though there is some basic intrinsic understanding of wolf within me.

I often experience wolf shifts. I’m often a wolf during my dreams and I’ve had many wolfish shifts, taking on a wolf mentality or feeling a wolf set of ears, tail and paws.
Wolves are by far my favorite animals, I find them beautiful and fascinating and above all I feel a spark, a connection, something that pulls me in and tells me that deep inside we are alike. I relate a lot to wolves, I can see aspects of myself in them.

My connection to wolves has led to a general love of all canines, particularly dogs as these are creatures I’m able to interact with on a daily basis. I’ve even based my career off of dogs, being a dog trainer and dog walker.
I feel my connection to wolves helps me in this a lot – while dogs are really quite different to wolves in many ways there are still some characteristics and body language that carry over. My understanding of wolves makes it easier for me to ‘read’ dogs and so respond to them and train them better.

It is very easy to mistake a connection to an animal for therianthropy and something many of us have done in the past. My first reaction on finding the term therian and realising how much of it applied to me, was to automatically assume I was a wolf. However looking at myself and my feelings I quickly saw my mistake.

My relationship with cats is very different to that of canines. I don’t feel that connection or pull towards cats that I do for wolves. But then, why should I? Identifying as something does not automatically create a connection to that thing (other then the obvious ‘I am this in some way’). While therians/otherkin identify as non-human, we are all still very much human, yet I’m sure many of us do not report feeling a strong connection and draw towards other humans. While identity and connections can overlap, they are very different things.